Purpose: Contemporary motor theories indicate that well-practiced movements are best performed automatically, without conscious attention or monitoring. We applied this perspective to speech production in school-age children and examined how dual-task conditions that engaged sustained attention affected speech fluency, speech rate, and language…

Purpose: This study examined language group differences in English syntactic knowledge based on performance on a sentence repetition task. Method: Fourth and sixth grade students who were monolinguals (n = 30), early bilinguals (i.e., simultaneous; n = 27), or late bilinguals (i.e., sequential; n = 29) completed an English sentence repetition…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognitive functions and language processing of people with aphasia (PWA) by taking a data-driven approach, as well as multiple cognitive components and multilevel linguistic perspectives. It is hypothesized that language performance is differentially associated with…

Purpose: This study compared attention control and flexibility in school-age children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) based on their performance on a behavioral task and parent report. We used a classic attention-shifting paradigm that included manipulations of task goals and timing to test effects of varying demands for…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate deficits in vocabulary development and novel word learning processes, which have been proposed to stem from their speech perception deficits. Aims: This study had two aims. The first was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention incorporating a computer-based phonetic…

This study investigated children's narrative evaluations about jealousy in relation to performance on a higher-order perspective-taking task and assessments of receptive vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence. Eighty children (5;0-11;11) narrated a wordless picture book about a jealous frog, answered probe questions about the plot, and generated a…

Forty native Spanish-speaking children (age 8;0-10;3), 20 with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 20 with Typical Language Development (TLD), received a battery of psycholinguistic tests, IQ, hearing screenings, and the Spanish Non-word Repetition Task (NRT). The children's repetition of 20 non-words was scored. The percentage of correct…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…

The current study was designed to examine the relationships between performance on a nonverbal phoneme deletion task administered in a dynamic assessment format with performance on measures of phoneme deletion, word-level reading, and speech sound production that required verbal responses for school-age children with speech sound disorders (SSDs).…